Death Over Dinner
Identity, Physical, Digital
Summary
End-of-life wishes are some of the most taboo and difficult topics to discuss with loved ones. To create awareness and encourage compassionate conversations in the most natural setting for difficult discussions — the dinner table — we worked closely with teams of advisors and experts to create the online platform Death Over Dinner.
Background
How we want to die represents the most important and costly conversation America isn’t having. To date, 75% of Americans say they would prefer to die at home, and yet only 25% do. Death over Dinner, also known as Let’s Have Dinner and Talk About Death, was created to change these statistics by fostering proactive and uplifting conversations about end–of–life decisions.
Organization Type
Social Movement, Public Health
Assignment
Use design to get people talking about taboo subjects with compassion
Challenge
To reach the broadest audience the Death Over Dinner platform needed to be free of religious or spiritual affiliation. Overall, the design and content found on the site needed to be universal and welcoming.
Client
Death Over Dinner
Years
2013 — 2017
Location
Seattle, WA USA
Collaborators
Approach
We teamed up with founder Michael Hebb and health and wellness experts to concept and crowdfund a platform that would encourage conversations about end–of–life care. The end result was an accessible and interactive 5–step guide that helps you plan, host and moderate the conversations with a variety of unbiased text, audio and video resources around the dinner table.
In building Death Over Dinner we decided we wanted to lend the invitation a human touch so we made the project’s identity handwritten and used custom type and illustrations. The yellow in the identity represents the sun setting on the horizon. In developing the design we constructed a colorful tableau, which is the opening image when you first come to the website. To create this tableau we collected a variety of mismatched table settings, bringing to mind items family members might pass down through the generations.
Research
End–of–Life Care
Reach
- Since Death Over Dinner’s launch in 2013, over 100,000 people in 30 countries have come together to share their thoughts about death with family and friends.
- Death Over Dinner has been launched and localized in Australia.
- In December 2016, Let’s Have Dinner and Talk About Death became an official partner with Arianna Huffington’s Thrive Global platform.
Components
Art Direction, Identity Manual, Print Collateral System, Digital Collateral System, Environmental Graphic System, Promotional Print Materials, Strategy, User Experience Design, User Interface Design and Development, CMS Development, Responsive Design
Technical Specs
HTML, CSS, Javascript, AJAX, WordPress
Team
Principal: Michael Ellsworth
Principal: Corey Gutch
Creative Direction: Gabriel Stromberg
Web Development: Shaun Kardinal and Jonathan Hudak
Account Management: Elise Carlson
Photography Amanda Ringstad
How we want to die represents an important and costly conversation that most of us are not having. Death Over Dinner is an online guide to help plan, host and moderate this conversation. To date, over 100,000 people in 30 different countries have used this platform.
